by Mark Greaney
TWENTY-FOUR
Ruth Ettinger, senior targeting officer in the Collections Department of the Mossad, reasonably assumed her meeting this morning would take place in the unincorporated community of Langley, Virginia, at the George Bush Center for Intelligence, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency. But a phone call just before eight A.M. that Thursday morning, just as she was climbing into her cab in front of her hotel in Tysons Corner, directed her instead to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, some three and a half miles away from the CIA.
The cab dropped her at the outer gate in front of Liberty Crossing, the name given to the intelligence campus in Tysons Corner that housed both the National Counterterrorism Center and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Ruth’s destination was Liberty Crossing Two, or LX2, the office building that held ODNI, the bureaucracy created after 9/11 and placed in charge of all seventeen American intelligence organizations and agencies.
At the Tysons McLean Drive gate to Liberty Crossing she handed over her cell phone and her handbag to federal security officials; then she was wanded and badged, and soon she boarded a golf cart driven by an armed security officer. The golf cart dropped her at the front door of LX2 and here she was met by a woman waiting outside, bundled in her coat and stamping her feet to stay warm.
Inside Ruth passed through a metal detector and was ushered into a small conference room on the third floor of the building. She was left alone at a conference table with a coffee service and a tray of glistening Danishes for over a half hour. She ignored the pastries, sipped black coffee, and wrote notes to herself on a notepad, anxious about the meeting to come.
Finally the door opened and she found herself face-to-face with Denny Carmichael, the director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service.
He strolled in with confidence; before the door shut behind him she saw that he had an entourage of at least half a dozen men and women left behind in the hallway, and she was thankful he had chosen to meet with her alone.
This particular quick get-together had been arranged by the director of Mossad’s Collections Department, Menachem Aurbach, an old friend of Carmichael’s. The two men had served in the trenches of their respective agencies since Ruth was in preschool, and they shared a professional and personal respect for one another, despite the occasional rivalries between the two ostensibly friendly nations. Aurbach had called Denny at home the evening before and implored him to meet with a young targeting officer already in the States on a matter that he promised would be of mutual importance for both agencies. Menachem had also suggested Denny keep the meeting off the books, as there were matters to be discussed that he might not want jotted down for the public record.
Carmichael agreed; he and Aurbach went back over thirty years, after all, but Ruth imagined he must have been somewhat put off by the request.
“Thank you for agreeing to meet with me,” Ruth said as she stood and walked around the conference table, her hand extended.
“My pleasure,” he said, but no pleasure showed on his face, only a mild surprise that the woman from Mossad that he was here to meet was actually quite attractive.
Ruth noted his attraction. It neither insulted nor flattered her; she only saw it as something to file away, to use if possible and if necessary.
Denny’s eyes lingered over her a little longer than necessary, and he smiled a craggy smile at her as they sat. There were so many deep-set worry lines in his face that it looked to Ruth as if his smile might cause his head to shatter. She put him in his midsixties, but he was fit and moved like a much younger man, and, it seemed to her, this was an impression of himself that he was more than happy to convey.
He said, “I’m sorry we had to change the venue on you at the last minute. Got called over here to ODNI early for a quick confab with the director.”
“No problem at all, sir.”
“How is Menachem?”
“He is sick and tired and disagreeable and pushy.”
Carmichael chuckled, surprised by the frankness of the young woman. “Unchanged in the past thirty years. That’s good, I guess.”
“He sends his regards.”
“He called me at home last night, asked me to make time to meet with one of his best people. He speaks very highly of you.”
Ruth did not smile at the platitude. Instead she said, “I solve problems for him and make him look good.”
“I see you don’t lack confidence,” Denny said with another surprised chuckle. He sipped water from his bottle, then smiled at Ruth once more. “I come from a different age, Ms. Ettinger, so you will have to forgive me if you find this out of line. But I just have to say it. The Mossad has always possessed the best-looking female officers.”
Ettinger did not miss a beat. “And the CIA has always possessed the most impertinent executives.”
Carmichael’s eyebrows rose at the young woman’s comment. She’d seen this before, many times. That moment when the man in front of her realizes she is not just a pretty face. He shuffled a little in his chair, and she liked this, liked making lecherous men uncomfortable with her intelligence and willingness to confront them. He laughed finally, finding her candor refreshing. “Your statement is true, but so is mine.”
Ruth only smiled politely.
“Tell me about the problem that brings you here today.”
She got right to it. “We have a source in Beirut. Not a joint source. One of ours exclusively.”
“Any good?”
“He has been reliable in the past.”
“And you want to share him with us?” He said it as a joke, and she obliged him with a smile before shaking her head. He moved on. “What is your source telling you that you, in turn, would like to tell me?”
“He is telling me—he is telling his case officer in Beirut, I should say—that Iranian agents met just yesterday with an American. A man whom they have hired to assassinate my prime minister. A contract killer who was, if rumors are to be believed, trained by your agency.”
“Who is this killer?”
“The Gray Man,” she said, her eyes locked on his, searching for hints of what this news meant to him.
Carmichael did not react. Instead he sat quietly for a moment before saying, “That particular nom de guerre comes up more often than you could possibly imagine, Ms. Ettinger.”
“As I said, we deem our source reliable. The Iranians, from what we understand, have a file on Courtland Gentry, and they compared their knowledge of him with information he was able to provide, and they determined they were dealing with the authentic Gray Man.”
“What information did he provide?”
“Our informant was peripheral to the meeting. He is passing on secondhand intelligence, admittedly, but his information in the past has been proven reliable enough to where we take this new threat very seriously, and we will be acting on it.”
She read something in his eyes now, and it surprised her for two reasons. For one, she was surprised he could not keep his craggy old face impassive. He’d been a case officer himself for decades, after all; he’d surely heard many things over his career that left him startled but nevertheless required him to hide any show of alarm or excitement.
And second, his reaction seemed to be less what she expected, which was Oh shit! and more of what she did not expect, which was Hell yes! It was an open secret that the CIA was hunting their former assassin turned rogue hit man, but it did surprise her to see that Carmichael was pleased to know the man had turned up mentioned in a plot to kill the head of a friendly nation.
Denny said, “Okay. He’s out there. We know that, so I’ll have to entertain the possibility your man in Beirut is credible. What is it that I can do for you?”
“I would like you to provide me everything you have on the Gray Man. He is . . . was, your man. You have been unable, despite what I am sure are
your agency’s best efforts, to rein him in for a number of years. We would like to look for him ourselves. To take care of him ourselves.”
“The Gray Man is our problem, Ms. Ettinger.”
She shook her head. “With due respect, once he took the contract on our prime minister, he became our problem. I have hunted down many individuals in the past several years. If Menachem alluded to my abilities and competence in your conversation last night, this is exactly what he was talking about. I am certain, with your help, I will be able to track him and stop him before he is able to do any more harm.”
“And by ‘stop him’ you mean . . . ?”
Ruth leaned forward over the table. “Kill or capture.”
Denny smiled and leaned back, then scooted his chair out and crossed his legs. Ruth was offended by the gesture, but she did not let on; she surmised that the man’s intentions were to insult her, and she would not play into his intentions. He said, “Ms. Ettinger, my service is not without its own resources. I’m not sure what you know about the Gray Man, but certainly your organization is dialed in enough to be aware there has been a five-year manhunt by us, not just CIA but also members of our Joint Special Operations Forces, to effect the capture of him.”
“But our prime minister is now in—”
He waved his hand dismissively. “Your asset in Lebanon says your PM is under threat. I get it. But what I don’t get is why Menachem Aurbach sends a young woman such as yourself to talk to me about this. I see you are all piss and vinegar and energized about your mission, but this building, the building next door, the CIA campus, hell, a dozen other buildings across D.C. are all chock-full of bright young people who have been working hard to locate and terminate this man, and yet he continues to create a swath of death and destruction around the world.”
“I’ll find him, Director Carmichael. I always do.”
“Ms. Ettinger, you come from a small agency in a small country. You fill yourself with delusions of your importance. You aren’t half as special as you think you are.”
He started to stand up, to end the meeting. “I mean you no offense, of course.”
Ruth stood herself, leaning over the table now with both hands gripping the edge. “Obviously, Director Carmichael, you don’t know a thing about me or my capabilities. I have personally effected the arrest or elimination of thirteen direct threats on Israel’s national leadership. Believe me, if you had office buildings full of people”—she lifted her hands, making sarcastic quotes with her fingers—“‘just like me,’ you would have already killed Gentry, ended the war on terror, and liberated both Cuba and North Korea. But you haven’t, have you?”
She slowed down a little, but the intensity in her voice did not lessen.
“You don’t know me, obviously, so you can’t be sure if I am as capable as I claim, but I have to think if CIA doesn’t know about me or my record by now, then that says more about your people and their abilities than it does about me and my abilities.
“If our prime minister is threatened by a CIA project gone haywire, a supersecret asset who went rogue to knock off some mafia dons and third-world despots but has now graduated to decapitating first-world democracies allied with the United States, then this five-year-long dull headache of yours is going to turn into an immediate bullet-to-the-brain head wound and it will come back to harm your agency in a very real and very public way.
“But starting today, your situation will improve, because I am here and I will find your little fuckup named Court Gentry, and I will call in my own set of killers, Metsada men who make your Joint Special Operations Forces look like pimple-faced pubescent Boy Scouts, and together we will kill your man because obviously you and your people can’t manage it yourselves.”
She sat back down slowly and finished with, “I mean you no offense. Of course.”
The door behind Carmichael opened slightly and a young woman leaned in, obviously checking on the noise. “Sir?”
“Out,” he barked.
The woman disappeared.
Denny sat quietly for a moment. Ruth watched him carefully, trying to discern what he was thinking. She felt she could see a rekindling in his eyes of the excitement she had noticed before. Otherwise, she was about to be thrown out the door and deported back to Israel.
But his next words—“What do you want to know about him?”—told her she had won.
She softened her tone. She knew when to bludgeon, and she knew when to coax. Now was the time for the latter. “Everything you can give us would be greatly appreciated. Obviously there will be sources and methods you will want to protect, even from your friends, and I can understand that. But I’m not Menachem; I don’t care about any big picture in our relationship. All I am concerned with, in any way, is finding this man and stopping him in any way I can.”
Carmichael did not respond immediately, so she pressed gently. “For example, before Court Gentry became a hit man, what did he do for you?”
“He was a dynamic operations specialist.”
She wrote on her pad and spoke aloud. “He was a hit man, then.”
“I did not say that.”
Ruth nodded, but she did not strike through her note.
Carmichael asked, “What does your service know about him already?”
“Mossad’s dossier on Court Gentry’s time with the CIA is thin. We don’t make it a point of compiling a large amount of information about operatives at allied agencies; our enemies keep us busy enough.”
Denny raised his eyebrows, giving off the message that he did not believe that for a second. The Mossad was legendary for spying on their friends as well as their enemies. Ruth knew what she was saying was not true, but she also knew she had to say it. Moreover, she knew Carmichael would know it was a lie, but she also knew he would let the comment go.
Such was the nature of relationships between friendly intelligence agencies.
She continued, “We don’t have too much more on his days post-CIA, but from what we know, his assassinations have seemed to follow some sort of a moral code. He has killed for money, repeatedly, but all his targets have been personalities with large amounts of blood on their hands. When discounting all the Gray Man killings that are nothing more than rumor, we have never seen him target anyone like our prime minister in his past.”
She summed up her dilemma. “We understand why the Iranians want Kalb dead, but we do not understand why the Gray Man wants Kalb dead.”
Carmichael sipped water from his bottle. “He’s a snake.”
Ruth cocked her head. “Kalb, or Gentry?”
“Gentry. Court Gentry has built up a reputation for two things. First, that he is the best black operator in the world. That reputation is, quite possibly, valid. His performance evals in the field were stellar. But the second part of his reputation is a complete and utter fantasy. That he is some sort of Robin Hood with a sniper rifle. A virtuous paladin.”
“Not true?” Ruth asked with a tone of genuine surprise.
“Forgive my language, but that is bullshit. Since he left CIA he has been a cold-blooded killer. Nothing more.”
“Perhaps our intelligence is faulty. It is our understanding he is an assassin with a conscience. We know he has turned down many contracts, lucrative contracts, because of the nature of the target’s history. There seems to exist some moral code involved, even if it is hard for us to discern.”
Carmichael responded tersely. “Gentry has killed colleagues of mine, Ms. Ettinger. Men with families, futures. I will begin to take it very personally if you continue to talk about how he is one of the good guys.”
“Of course I am not saying he is a good guy. I am only trying to understand how his sense of morality would be satisfied by killing Ehud Kalb. This information is very much pertinent to hunting him—”
Ruth stopped speaking. She understood. There was something personal going o
n here that she had not detected until now. “You knew him. You actually knew him personally.”
He waved his hand in the air and sat back. “Not well. There are a lot of guys like him. Not like him in the sense . . . you know what I mean. A lot of tip-of-the-spear operations personnel. So, no, I did not know him well. But yes . . . I did know him.”
Ruth wrote something down. “Well then. You may be the best person to ask. The legend of him is quite remarkable. They say he could pass you on the street and you would not notice him.”
Now Denny smiled thinly. “Ms. Ettinger. He could pass you in your kitchen and you would not notice him.”
She stopped writing. Looked up. “He’s that good?”
He smiled. “Find him and you can see for yourself.”
Ruth smiled back now. “If you let me see his file, I will do just that.”
Denny drummed his fingers on the polished table for a moment. “There is a man I want you to meet.”
“Director Carmichael, unless this man is Courtland Gentry, I am already talking to the most important person in the equation.”
“That’s not exactly true.”
Ettinger cocked her head.
Denny said, “I’m talking about the director of the operation against Gentry.”
“Very well. Is he available?”
“If I tell him he is available, then he is available.”
She smiled. Fighting the urge to stand up. “Is he here at Liberty Crossing or over at Langley?”
“Neither.”
“He is posted to a foreign station?”
“He’s not with the agency.”
Now Ruth Ettinger was utterly confused. Denny saw this and said, “We have found it prudent to bring in private sector assistance to help us with the Court Gentry situation.”
“You’ve outsourced the hunt for your number one target?”
Denny nodded, picking lint off the collar of his suit. “Townsend Government Services.”
